Hi all:
A friend of mine writes datasheets and user manuals for many similar
devices with Microsoft Word 2010. Many sections (legalese, company logo,
some device features) are exactly the same across many documents.
Maintaining so many copies of the same text is a pain. If you want to
fix or enhance something, you have to manually update many copies in
many documents. Just to clarify: these are not just short database
fields, but complete text sections with subsections, full formatting, etc.
He has recently learnt about Microsoft Word's {INCLUDETEXT} field. By
pressing F9 (Update Fields), he can update all imported sections in a
document at once.
This mechanism has its limitations. He cannot update all documents at
once. And, although some sections are almost exact copies, some of them
mention the device's model number, which is different in each document.
Perhaps the most severe limitation is that he cannot update styles
across documents at once. If the marketing department decides that all
section titles should be blue, he has no way to change them all
automatically.
What he really needs is some sort of automatic templating system that
can generate or update many documents at once.
I would like for him to move to LibreOffice. But Writer has no such
{INCLUDETEXT} feature, right?
What would be the best way to knock such system together with
LibreOffice? I can write a few scripts or Makefiles if necessary.
My friend is no programmer, and he is not willing to learn some markup
language like AsciiDoc in order to write the documentation. Besides,
other colleagues contribute some text every now and then. They all know
how to use a word processor, but it would not be realistic that all of
them get familiar with something like AsciiDoc.
Thanks in advance,
R. Diez
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